Saturday, February 22, 2014

What's brown and sounds like a bell? Dung!

Reading the Book of Life in Prehistoric Dung
Chapter 1
Karen Chin doesn’t have all the answers, but she is willing to make those
awkward phone calls that will give her the information she needs. There
was the time back in 1998 when she needed to know what size animal
could produce a fecal mass of 2.4 liters in one go. So she called a
physician who studied bowel movements. “I said, ‘This is going to be a
funny question, but I’m a paleontologist, and I’m interested in finding
out what is the largest fecal mass that a human can produce. I wonder if
I can talk to the doctor about this.’ ” She pauses in her anecdote,
remembering the silence on the other end of the phone line. “It was a
weird question."